The present disclosure relates to the field of display devices, and more particularly to a flexible display device and a manufacturing method thereof.
Flexible organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays have many advantages over conventional liquid crystal displays, such as bendability, active illumination, high contrast, light weight, and fast response times, etc. Therefore, in recent years, OLED technology has received more and more attention, and people have higher and higher requirements for OLED displays performance, such as technologies for narrow borders and full screens.
Generally, the OLED display mainly includes a display area, a fan-out area, a bending area, a driving printed circuit board (e.g., a flexible printed circuit, FPC), etc. The bending area is used to connect metal wires in the peripheral fan-out area and the driving printed circuit board, so that the driving printed circuit board can be located on the rear side of the display area by bending of the bending area. A bending performance of the bending area not only affects signal transmission of the driving printed circuit board but also directly determines size of a lower frame of the display. This is also a key technology to realize the narrow frame and the full screen.
Referring to FIG. 1, which shows a cross-sectional view of a flexible display device 10 of the prior art, where only a display area 11 and a bending area 12 of the flexible display device 10 are shown, and the rest are omitted. The flexible display device 10 includes a substrate 101, a buffer layer 102, a gate insulating layer 103, a dielectric layer 104, a thin film transistor (TFT) channel 105, a gate 106, an organic layer 107, a metal layer 108, an organic planarization layer 109, a pixel electrode 110, a pixel definition layer 111, and an organic light emitting layer 112. The flexible display device 10 includes a plurality of organic film layers, such as the buffer layer 102, the gate insulating layer 103, and the dielectric layer 104. The above organic film layers are basically made from an organic material, such as silicon nitride, silicon oxide or the like. Characteristics of the inorganic material are relatively brittle and not resistant to bending stress, so it is easy to crack under external force. In order to ensure that the flexible display device 10 can be flexed successfully, the inorganic film layers in the bending area 12 are removed, and an organic material layer (i.e., the organic layer 107) is filled, thereby causing the existing flexible display device 10 has a drawback of high manufacturing cost.
Accordingly, it is necessary to provide a flexible display device and a manufacturing method thereof to solve the technical problems in the prior art.